YouTuber Coby Persin has over 2.7 million subscribers. He’s a serial poser prankster who performs “social experiments” on unsuspecting members of the general public. This time around, his latest video is going viral for a very different reason. During a “quick photoshoot” in NYC, he decided to block a lane of traffic on one of New York’s busiest roads.

Throughout the video, cars are honking their horns, and having to squeeze into traffic on other lanes in order to get past. One driver, however, thought he’d take a slightly more proactive approach. The unknown driver pulled up behind him, took a bat from the back of his car, and then proceeded to smash the windshield of Coby’s gold BMW i8.

Automotive photographer can be very dangerous stuff, especially when it comes to racing. Over the years, some very close calls have been caught on camera, but few are as close as this. When Canadian drag racer Shawn Mcfalls had a 4 link bar break at the start of a race at the Grand Bend Motorplex in Ontario earlier this year, he was quickly sent off course.

This sent him and his Camaro right into the guardrail, then flying above it, straight over the head of an unnamed trackside photographer. Fortunately, the photographer had lightning reactions and was able to get out of the way. This could’ve ended up far worse.

What happens when a miniature photographer discusses collaboration with a multi-million car company? He ends up shooting their $160,000 car, an Audi R8, using a $40 scale model.

Photographer Felix Hernández (more from Felix) discussed some potential ideas with Audi. The result was so awesome that Audi decided to share it on their media channels. The catch? the photos were not made using a real car. Instead Felix used a small model car.

The process is not trivial though and does require some understanding of scale, perspective and whole lots of flour.

Unless we are an automotive photographer, getting access to fancy cars at the environments in which we’d like to photograph them can be a tricky proposition. But what can we do with those images of cars we get on the street or at shows?

In this video tutorial from Tutvid, photographer Nathaniel Dodson shows us how we can cut out those cars and composite them realistically into other scenes to give us the images we want.

I did a shoot recently with a big BMW using only one speed light and I wanted to share how I made it happen. The idea is, of course to learn something new, but also to show that having little gear should not stop you from pushing yourself. Sadly I cannot use the bike photo, but I reproduced the process using a trusted unique Kymco Like, it’s not a BMW but it will do. My original plan was to use a full blown studio setup: monoblocks, softboxes and umbrellas as diffusers for the shot. But as I was setting up I thought of a crazy idea: Light is light, so why don’t I just add the light from multiple exposures and shoot it with one small speedlight. So here is a step by step tutorial and video on how we did it.

As a former software engineer I can completely relate to the need SmugMug programmer Ryan Doherty had do build and drive LeMons cars to let out some of the cubical fever amassed during the day.

But how to you take the dissonance between (daytime) programming and (nighttime) car-havoc-ing? Photographer Benjamin Von Wong spent a night in a car shop with Ryan, a LeMons car, some angle grinders a bunch of Broncolor strobes and a Mamiya Leaf to show that excitement.

Interestingly the first thing Ben has to say has to do with the criticality of gear in his vision:

One of the perks that I have as a photographer is the opportunity to shoot super cars every now and then. Sadly, I don’t have a big ass studio that I can fit a car into, and I need to improvise by lighting cars on whatever location I can get. Those can be inside a garage or in the street, or somewhere else.

Here are 3 different lighting techniques that you can use with cars or when shooting large product or still life shots. [Read more…]

Me and some friends were practicing our photography with cars and wanted to shoot his Porsche. We were only shooting the car inside his garage and didn’t have a studio that can fit a whole car so we did what we could. We tried shooting the Porsche with studio strobes and a couple of speedlights but we also wanted to do something different.

Long time ago, when I started playing around with light painting, I light-painted my guitar using a piece of flashlight. I thought it would be really cool if I used the same technique only using a really big subject (say, a Porsche) and a really big light source. The results are spectacular, and this is definitely something you can try at your own garage. [Read more…]

John Aldred is a portrait and animal photographer in Lancaster, England. you can see some of his work on his website, or find him on Facebook or Twitter.

Stefan Kohler is a conceptual photographer, specialized in mixing science, technology and photography. He is one of the founders of Kamerakind, based in Traunstein, Southern Germany. You can follow him on Facebook or on 500px.com

Liron Samuels is a wildlife and commercial photographer based in Israel.

When he isn't waking up at 4am to take photos of nature, he stays awake until 4am taking photos of the night skies or time lapses.